I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.

Facts are lonely things.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.